


Four Roads to Earth

by deborah_judge



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, New Caprica, Questionable Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 22:10:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/217594">Three Paths to Peace</a>.  That story is an AU in which Kara falls in love with Leoben on New Caprica (dubcon warning).  This story continues that AU until they find Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Roads to Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements: embolalia and kag523 will both recognize their influence here. Many thanks to embolalia for betareading.

**One**

The planning began for finding Earth six weeks after Sophia's birth. There were many meetings, Laura and Leoben comparing visions, the Oracle trying to make sense of them, and Boomer and Athena chiming in with varying interpretations of scripture Leoben kept insisting that Kara was essential. "You're the one to find Earth," he said. "I know it. I've seen it." Kara found it hard to pay attention to all the talk of star charts and destiny, none of it made sense to her. She watched Leoben's hands as he spoke, and thought about how he had played with Kacey on the floor.

After the meeting she went to talk to Leoben. Boomer hung back, like she didn't want to leave them alone. Kara felt sick of being protected. "I'd like to talk to the father of my child alone for a few minutes if that's okay," Kara said to Boomer, and didn't have to even turn around to feel the brightness of Leoben's smile. "Let's get out of here," she said to him.

It was night and the air had its New Caprica chill. He told her about Earth, the blue planet surrounded by clouds, and asked her questions about Sophia that she didn't answer. She still hadn't let him see her. Without thinking, she let her feet lead them up a small hill and behind a copse of trees. She had been here before, during the resistance, and thoughts of him had kept her warm and alive.

Finally they were at the place she remembered, the place she hadn't intended to come. It was a green, grassy, soft indentation in the hills. She had hidden here, her pregnant body surrounded by leaves, imagining Leoben covering her and inside her. Her hands drifted to the buckle of his belt, and the next moment he lifted her up and then they were down in the grass together.

His touch on her was like fire, she burned for him as he crashed his mouth down on her neck, and then her chest. His tongue was rough on her sensitive nipple. She needed him, ached with an ache that could only be soothed when he slid inside her. He had made her love him. It wasn't her fault. She arched up to his thrusts, and every motion felt like bliss.

Kara thought about going to find Earth, but as the days and meetings passed she found that she didn't have anything to say about it. She had brought back the arrow. Maybe that was enough. Then she thought about Leoben going without her, and the thought made her ache from missing him. "Frak this," she said to herself, and to the entire meeting the next day. When the coalition of humans and Cylons left, Kara sat in her tent, holding Sophia, cradling her close and trying not to think about Leoben.

 **Two**

Kara liked being at home with Sophia, nursing her and feel the warmth of her breath. Still, that wasn't enough. With Laura gone, and Baltar no longer interested in government, they held an election for interim president and Tyrol was elected. Kara thought about running for a quorum seat, to give herself something to do, but instead she applied for the vacant position as Chief of Police.

The truce between humans and Cylons on New Caprica was uneasy. They had stopped killing each other, mostly, and maybe that was the best that peace could look like, all things considered. With Bill and Saul gone on the _Galactica_ with Laura to find Earth and Lee and Sam on the _Pegasus_ patrolling for stray ships sent by Cavil, Kara figured they could use her planetside on New Caprica security. The next day she broke up a fistfight between Hot Dog and a Three. "It's okay," Hot Dog said to her that night over Triad. "What you went through, with that toaster, I know you get it." The next day Kara caught a Three looking approvingly in Sophia's direction. With a shudder, Kara realized what Leoben had given her.

The following week there was a riot at the Four's compound by humans who were looking for medical supplies. Kara broke it up. She shouted, and people listened, humans and Cylons both. They respected her. And when they didn't she could take them down, like she did the Eight who wouldn't stop loitering outside the Tyrol house. They respected that too.

When Kara wanted sex she went down to their makeshift pub and frakked anyone who was drunk enough to let her. She thought about calling Sam, but she was too frakked up for that. She didn't want him loving her. She still missed Leoben and it felt like nausea.

Sophia grew quickly. In the mornings Kara nursed and fed her, and in the evenings she held her and sang. She was glad that other people could watch her the rest of the day. Natalie loved Sophia, it seemed, almost as much as Kara did. So did Boomer, and Caprica Six. Twos offered as well, of course, but Kara wouldn't let any of them near her daughter. Sophia's hair grew in blond and her eyes were a fierce blue.

*

"The Earth that we found was broken," Laura told Kara when they returned two and a half years later. Laura told her about ruined towers over dead cities, cactus plants the only things alive as they pushed up in their determined way through the radioactive ground. In a burnt city two-thousand-year-old corpses lay in the streets, nearly decomposed but still recognizable in the thin and lifeless air. There were metal bodies as well, rusted and twisted. There were groups of bodies, what looked like families together. It was clear that none had survived.

In the center of the city there were the ruins of an opera house. When Laura stood in it she could almost hear ancient music, the song of a people centuries dead. "Is this like anything you know?" she asked Kara, but it was clear that she wasn't expecting an answer. But it was like something that Kara knew. It was like Caprica, when she had gone back to take the arrow that she had given into Laura's hands.

Even the water was lifeless, Laura told her, flat clear blue with a thin coating of ash. She knelt on the ground and felt the sand in her fingers and watched the waves break on the grey and empty shore. "I was supposed to find Earth," Laura said to Kara.

 _So was I,_ Kara thought, and wondered if things would have gone differently if she had been there. But that was crazy, there were things she could do but she couldn't make a dead world not be dead. If she could do that she'd have done it already. She thought about Caprica, and the Colonies, and the very little on New Caprica that they had managed to build. "Maybe you did," she said. "Maybe that's the only Earth we're ever going to find."

 **Three**

Leoben told Kara his story about Earth as they lay together in at night in the shadow of a tree near her home on New Caprica, breathless after sex. He had sent a message asking her to meet him there, for the fourth time since his return six months earlier. The first three times she had said no. This time she didn't. She pressed her face to his chest as he told her about Earth. It wasn't the first time she head the story. She had heard it before, a story that must have been his, told on New Caprica about Earth:

 _Once there was a planet called Earth the home of the Thirteenth Tribe. They built technology to serve them, enslaved it. The robots they made rebelled, burned the planet and charred the air. This is the Earth that God gave us._

And the other story:

 _Once there was a planet of Cylons called Earth. Made things, they made other creatures, who destroyed those who made them. Their world is broken. This is the Earth that God gave us._

Kara heard these stories from Tyrol, as they drank together in the makeshift pub on New Caprica City. She heard them from the Threes and Fours and Eights who had asked to join her police force, when they sat by campfires on their night patrols. They told these stories like they would make a difference. Maybe they would.

"Will we go to Earth, mama?" Sophia asked Kara one morning. Maybe she was seeing things, like her father. Maybe she had just heard the stories. She was only three. Kara held her, rocked her close, and didn't know what to say.

Wrapped in Leoben's arms Kara told him about the work she'd done here, the fighting that hadn't stopped and the fights she'd been able to end. Tyrol was a good president, she said. Fair. There were unions. She told him about Sophia, now four years old, and how she liked to sing and climb trees and wrestle with Hera on the ground, and how they sometimes stared into the distance together, far away.

"Can I see our daughter?" Leoben asked. "Just let me see her."

Kara remembered Kacey, not much older then than Sophia is now. "When she's older," Kara said.

"How much older?" Leoben asked.

"Older," Kara said. She didn't have an answer. She was feeling this out. She was going to make it work.

"Will she hate me?" Leoben asked.

"I don't know," Kara said. She felt the memory of Kacey close, like she could have been their child. "I do, sometimes. But I'll try not to teach her that."

He was quiet. She could feel his heartbeat on her face. He could accept what she said, at least for the moment, or at least not push against it, and the thought made her want him again. She wrapped one leg around his waist, then turned them so she straddled him. She wanted him more than breath.

She wanted him. She wanted hope. She wanted it to be possible. "And you're wrong," she said. "You didn't find Earth. You said I needed to do it. Said it was my gods-frakking destiny. Well I did. I found it."

His eyes were bright in the starlight, and in that moment Leoben was so beautiful she could almost thank the gods for giving him to her. "Where is it, Kara?" he asked. Her hands were on her waist and her breasts and everywhere. She teased herself on his tip, then took him inside her. "It's here," she said. She pushed down on him, then lay down on his chest to feel him close against her as he thrust. She gripped the frozen ground with her hand and felt the sky around them. "This is Earth," she said, and it sounded like _I love you_. The world was solid under them. They could live here. "This is Earth," she said.

 **Four**

When Sophia was five, she started to sing with Hera a song that Kara thought she could recognize. It was a song Kara's father had taught her, but Kara knew she hadn't sund that song since her father disappeared. Hera and Sophia sang it together, over and over, and when Kara gave them crayons they sketched the notes on a page. And maybe she was only thinking this way because of too many years of loving Leoben, but when they sang it for what felt like the hundredth time Kara thought she might have a sense of what it was.

She took the notes to the Police headquarters and put them in the central computer as coordinates. The computer showed her a medium-size yellow star. It could support planets. They were too far away to tell. To know for certain they would need to go there.

The _Galactica_ and the _Pegasus_ were tired from the long battle with the Cylons and the journey they had already made to the Earth they thought they found. They would need resources and repairs before another long journey. Resources were scarce, and they needed them on New Caprica. And Kara wasn't going to give the coordinates to the Cylons to go alone.

Kara erased the coordinates from the computer and put the drawings back in her pocket. It was late, it was already dark, and Leoben was waiting for her under their tree. She couldn't wait to see him. This was their Earth, the best Earth that they could find together. Maybe their daughter would find a better one.


End file.
